


Diary of an Insomniac

by arby



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-17
Updated: 2006-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-05 19:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arby/pseuds/arby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam hasn't slept well in a long time, and the strain is starting to show. Set in the second half of S1, at some point between <i>Nightmare</i> and <i>Devil's Trap</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diary of an Insomniac

_Diary of an Insomniac_, by Sam Winchester

There's a certain feeling of solitary madness to being an insomniac in the daytime – you walk alone amid the sleep-sated like someone who's secretly tripping. Your surroundings are alive with a hallucinatory intensity – something's always hovering just outside your peripheral vision. You feel constantly dirty – you think the extra hours your body spends fully active have something do with it.

During the day, the Herculean effort required simply to stay awake makes you unbelievably cranky – a seething ocean of rage surges beneath your every word and movement. Sometimes it feels like you spend the entire day on the verge of tears. Other times the world goes completely unreal, and it feels as if you're floating from step to step, or falling asleep every other second.

You have to piss pretty much constantly, like a pregnant woman, the urge hovers somewhere in the background of your consciousness like a nagging warning light on a car, always on for no good reason. You feel simultaneously hungry and nauseous, as if you're literally running on fumes and your body is consuming itself. Sometimes you think you can feel your mind deteriorating too, like a meteor shedding pieces of itself as it enters atmosphere.

* * * * *

12:00 – 12:10 am: A brief window of opportunity presents itself in which you become sleepy. Not tired – you walk around all day tired to the bone, like a zombie or a vampire's victim, all life drained out of you by exhaustion, but one thing you very rarely are is sleepy, or at least not at night when the occasion calls for it.

12:12 am: Within minutes of his head hitting the pillow, Dean is out like a light and snoring happily. You want to kick him in the head.

12:14 am: By the time you're ready for bed, the moment has passed. Experience tells you there's no chance in hell you'll be asleep before 4, but the slim hope leads you to lie down anyway and start the torture.

12:40 am: Your mind is racing like a hamster on a wheel. You go through hot and cold spells like a fever victim. Each position you try to arrange yourself in is more uncomfortable than the last. You toss and turn, flinging sheets and blankets about angrily.

1:28 am: You finally get up and turn on the TV. There's rarely anything even remotely watchable in these shitbag motels, so your standards have lowered considerably. Sometimes all you can hope for is something other than QVC or infomercials.

1:45 – 3:03 am: You watch most of a _Columbo_ episode, figuring out the mystery about five minutes before Columbo drawls the explanation. Something vaguely sleep-like is flitting about the back of your mind, and once again you're suckered into lying back down and turning off the lights.

3:14 am: Typically, the second you lie down, you feel wide awake. Habit keeps you there, trying not to move, because moving just exacerbates the tossing and turning. Obscure areas of your body announce their presence with random itching, as if bedbugs are biting you – more than once you've turned the sheets inside out looking for nonexistent vermin – or shooting pains in your bones for no apparent reason. Your neck starts to ache from pressing your head into the pillow trying to get comfortable. The cheap motel clock mocks you with its satanic red numbers glaring evilly in the dark and the knowledge that the horribly loud buzzing of the alarm will go off within a few hours. Dean mocks you with his blissful eight hours of uninterrupted slumber, snoring away like a fucking jerk. Sometimes he dreams and twitches a little or shouts "Dad!" (or sometimes "Sam!" or "No!" – or one time something that sounded like "tuna!") or snorts, but for the vast majority of the night he's completely out cold. If he does wake up for whatever reason, like to take a leak, he falls asleep again within five minutes every damn time. You think the last time you were able to do that was when you were young enough to have to take naps. Because of his freakish ability to sleep anywhere (even in the car), he has little to no understanding of the hell you go through almost every night. It's one thing to know that everyone needs sleep, and to sympathize with your being tired – which he does, and you know he worries about you – but unless someone's been there, they can't even begin to know the horror.

4:27 am: Just when you begin to think that there's some even remotely comfortable position you can achieve, you feel the impending need to piss. This enrages you to no end. If you get up now, it's all over. You might as well go out for coffee and be done with it. But if you lie there and by some miracle manage to fall asleep, within a few hours your bladder will wake you up again, and here too you might as well just give up hope of getting any more sleep. You continue to lie there, paralyzed with indecision, hoping sleep will make the choice for you.

4:57 am: Like an old enemy, the familiar despair has settled in. _This is torture, it's literally as if someone is torturing me_, you think, as tears of frustration and sleeplessness start leaking out of your eyes of their own accord. It's not that you're actually crying, but after a certain period of time without sleep, your eyes just start watering, to the point that your face is wet with it. The damp skin of your cheek sticks to the wet spot on your pillow, and starts to chafe as you continue to toss and turn. At some point you realize you're clenching your jaw with sheer rage and the injustice of it all.

5:32 am: You finally get up and piss, then sheer masochism makes you get back in bed. Dawn is seeping under the door like a stain, and the fucking birds are cheeping, those heartless bastards, and no doubt some morning squirrels are running around out there, all bright-eyed and bushy-fucking-tailed. You are filled with a helpless fury at every living creature that is either asleep or cheerfully awake, having gotten sleep tonight.

5:54 am: You start rehashing every unpleasant experience in your life, from the most minor argument with a friend, or various embarrassing incidents at school, to Jess's death and how it's all your fault, to innumerable fights with Dad and Dean, to all the mistakes you made when hunting, and the people who died or got hurt because of it. It's as if insomnia isn't torturing you enough, you have to heap more coals upon your own head on top of it – or as if you feel the need to punish yourself for giving in to insomnia. This is the point where sometimes the tears become real, silently you choke on the lump in your throat until they threaten to drown you, every sniffle sounding like a gunshot in the horrible silence punctuated only by Dean's soft snores, because sometimes it's better to feel something, no matter how painful, than to go on in the endless monotony of uninterrupted awareness with an absence where your heart should be.

6:45 am: Somewhere in the midst of this exercise, sleep ambushes you like a fish stealing the lure from an inattentive angler. You dream that Mom (now that you know what she looks like, thanks to her ghost, she can appear even more real in your dreams) is saying to you that it's all your fault, you killed her by being born, and everyone hates you. This segues into a prophetic nightmare about a car driven by a ghost that's causing multiple-car pileups in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

7:30 am: A bleeding woman presses her face against the window as a car (_1984 green Toyota Corolla_, you notice, and file it away) sinks into the black depths of a lake, and even though you can't hear her screams, the image jolts you awake. If it's even possible, you feel even more exhausted than before you fell asleep. Sometimes you wonder how long it takes to die of sleep deprivation. You know it's the lack of REM that's hurting you the most, and that it's only a matter of time before you actually go insane. With a deep sense of hopelessness, you get up, shower briefly, throw on some clothes to go get coffees for you and Dean. You're starving but you force yourself to wait until the alarm goes off before waking Dean up.


End file.
